March 18, 2001

ON WRITERS AND WRITING

Writing in the Shadows

By MARGO JEFFERSON

n Henry James's story ''The Middle Years,'' an artist says: ''We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.'' But those words apply to readers, too, for we read in the dark when we encounter a real work of art; we can never know where it will take us. What a shame that so much of the time now, before we're allowed to be alone with a book, we've seen it blanketed in press releases, reviews and dust-jacket testimonials that tell us what to think. By the time I got to W. G. Sebald's books -- what does one call them? meditations, elegies, mutations grown from memoir, history, literary biography and prose poetry -- they had already been canonized. Important critics and novelists had certified their greatness, using even the m-word -- ''masterpiece.''

Sebald was born in Germany in 1944. So his life and work lie in the shadow of World War II, and in a series of other, overlapping shadows. He invokes the shadow of history: the Holocaust, European imperialism and environmental destruction. He shadows great writers of the past (Stendhal, Kafka, Thomas Browne, Conrad), retelling episodes from their lives in his own halftones and undertones. He shadows his own past, returning to the village where he grew up and traveling to the United States to see relatives and collect gothic tales of the emigrant dead. And he lives inside the shadow of his own melancholy. His prose, as translated from the German by Michael Hulse, is nocturnal, the rhythm fixed and stately as a tolling bell.

I began with Sebald's last book, ''The Rings of Saturn'' (published in Germany in 1995, translated and published here in 1998), just as a friend was starting ''The Emigrants'' (1992 and 1996). And I was quite caught up. Sebald, or rather the unnamed narrator, starts on a walking tour of England: confronted with both an ''unaccustomed sense of freedom'' and the ''traces of destruction'' that mark even the remote Suffolk countryside, he gradually finds himself experiencing a ''paralyzing horror.'' Exactly a year later he enters a Norwich hospital ''in a state of almost total immobility.'' The book begins to take shape in his mind. And when he is released he begins a journey into the cruelty and decay that lie at the heart of all natural beauty and worldly pomp.

Then I began to feel numbed, and I put the book down. He was too fascinated by his own despair. Meanwhile, my friend had finished ''The Emigrants'' with real excitement. She said it felt liberating to be freed from the constraints of genre. Sebald confronts the Holocaust obliquely, she went on, and in a way that shows how deeply rooted in German culture Jews were. And that knowledge gathers slowly, until it overwhelms you in the last chapter.

''The Emigrants'' starts when Sebald and his wife, Clara, come to the English village of Hingham to rent a flat, and find their landlord, a white-haired old man, lying on the ground counting the blades of grass. He is Dr. Henry Selwyn, who began life as Hersh Seweryn, the son of a Lithuanian lens grinder. And his life story is one in which hope and promise decline so quietly that by the end what should be tragedy has already become memory. We move through three more narratives, and into the lives of exiled, wandering Jews and gloomy emigrant Germans, Sebald's relatives, who worked for Jewish families in New York. The most extraordinary one was his great-uncle Ambros Adelwarth, who was butler, traveling companion, lover (it was said) and doppelgänger to Cosmo Solomon, the eccentric gambler son of a powerful banking family.

I spoke to another friend, who loves and teaches ''The Emigrants.'' What I love best, she said, is the way it hovers between fiction and nonfiction. And its musical form -- the way he presents a theme, then develops it. (She cited Uncle Ambros in a mental hospital in the early 1950's, undergoing shock treatments every few days under the careful supervision of a German psychiatrist; how could one not think of the electric barbed wire fences in German concentration camps?) We were both overwhelmed by the purity and anguish of the last chapter, where we read the letters Luisa Lanzberg Ferber wrote to her son in England just before she was deported to a camp in Riga. They recall every detail of her childhood (the green velvet armchairs with fringe, the red bound volumes of Heine's poetry, the albino stable boy) in a German village one-third of whose residents had been Jews since the 17th century.

BOOK EXCERPT

"Beyle, who claims at this period, owing to a wholly misdirected education
which had aimed solely at developing his mental faculties, to have had the
constitution of a fourteen-year-old girl, also writes that he was so affected by
the large number of dead horses lying by the wayside, and the other detritus of
war the army left in its wake as it moved in a long-drawn-out file up the
mountains, that he now has no clear idea whatsoever of the things he found so
horrifying then. It seemed to him that his impressions had been erased by the
very violence of their impact."

My friend also spoke of the man with the butterfly net, a Nabokovian figure, who keeps appearing and disappearing. I found him blatantly symbolic and literary. Sebald is blatantly literary. Not just in his subjects but in his influences. The acknowledged ones include Borges and Kafka; the unacknowledged ones include Walter Benjamin, Thomas Bernhard, Juan Carlos Onetti. He collects disasters, a third friend said; he's a literary undertaker. (Sebald on an English heath, contemplating the forests that are disappearing: ''Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artifact we create. . . . From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.'')

Now I have read all three of Sebald's books. (''Vertigo,'' his first and simplest, uses many of the same elements.) I am impressed. Certainly I appreciate the language, the elegant structuring, the mingling of genres. I am moved by how Sebald, by temperament an aesthete, keeps looking for ways to approach and understand history in its brute simplicity and its subtleties. But I am weary of words like ''masterpiece'' and ''greatness.'' Once we -- critics as well as readers -- have analyzed a work's techniques and effects and history, there is little else to be said beyond exploring why we feel as we do. This is no longer a question of rational judgment. It is about what quickens the mind and the senses, gratifies long-felt needs, gives thought and feeling some unexpected turn. Sebald repays thought and at times stirs my emotions. I feel as if he has fallen under a spell, though -- one that makes him approach everything in the same way, again and again. This landscape of rarefied solitude has given you all it can, I want to say. You must wake up now and go on.